The recent 86th Street Station may be considered a real piece of art, as the interior design that includes the exquisite works which were made by Chuck Close. His creative approach to depicting a human face with a high degree of realism led to the creation of the one of the most eye-catching station design in New York City that all the visitors absolutely must see.
I found the history of an American artist, Chuck Thomas Close, was born on July 5th, 1940 in Monroe, Washington. I also did some researches and found the story of Chuck Close himself, as the hardships he went through his life that makes his achievements stand out even more with the distinguished modern artists. The artistic path started from the University of Washington School of Art. Then Close graduated from Yale University, and in 1964 he won a scholarship to study in Vienna, which heavily contributed to the development of his outlook. Now he lives and works in New York City. His majored art style and movement are large-scale creatively photo-realistic portraits; some of his works have been hanged on the new station, at the Second Avenue and 86th street in New York City since 2017. The initial works by Close had a lot of features from Abstract Expressionism, but they were rejected by the artist during the period at the University of Massachusetts, and the focus was switched primarily to the portraits. A passionate fan of Roman style floor mosaics, Close has been working in this sphere for about 15 to 20 years, developing his own recognizable style and artistic skills to create the most realistic works. In 1988 Close suffered a severe spinal blood clot that left the artist partially paralyzed and chained to the wheelchair[1]. However, Chuck Close never gave up on his work, and the 86th Street Station is a wonderful proof of that.
In 2009, around 300 other artists, Chuck Close was assigned to take on the interior design of the upcoming station. After a quite extensive development period, which actually cost about $4,5 billion, 86th Street Station along the second avenue Q line finally opened on January 1st, 2017, and it is one of the greatest achievements of Close’s career. He loves working with humble mosaics, so Close made some huge sized portraits for the station for celebrating on New Year’s Day that all together form a biggest permanent art installation in the history of the whole state. People might think that these portraits are painting or photographs, but actually, when they close up these enormous portraits, they will realize that it is meticulously rendered mosaics artworks. These twelve large-scale portraits are created by at least two patterns such as glass and ceramic mosaic and ceramic tile. His ten mosaic portraits of multiple people and two tile works depicting the author himself are using many groundbreaking painting techniques like breaking images down into grids or pixels. The mosaics achieve an impressive height of about nine feet high and cover about 1000 squares of walls[2]. In addition, the work underlines the deep cultural and ethnic variety of the New York City as the models in the portraits represent the diversification of people who pass through the MTA system. He said that he wanted the images to reflect the ridership on the floor below and also for this. He wanted to include portraits of different nations as African, Americans, and Asians. The accent is also made of both old and young people. The models cast includes many known personalities. For example, while descending the escalator the visitors will see the portrait of a composer Philip Glass in his youth, a wild-haired young man, watching over the passengers; such as Zhang Huan, Sienna Shields, and Pozsi B. Kolor are meant to reinforce the diversity of the ridership[3]. Other mosaics include Kara Walker, painters Alex Katz and Cecily Brown, artist Cindy Serman, and musician Lou Reed who volunteered to participate in the elaboration of this artwork.
Chuck Close explained himself for the purpose behind his masterpiece as “The richness of the city is all the various cultures coming together”. Therefore, if you are willing to visit the place where the worlds merge and the boundaries of cultural differences vanish, the 86th Street Station is right where you need to be. This is not just the common place that people thoughtlessly go through in their routine. I am sure that this is the place, where the pure beauty of the humanity rises from our differences.
These are my final bride2 project video.